Google G Suite

G Suite offers most of the power and flexibility of its main office-suite rival, Microsoft Office 365. Its entirely cloud-based tools can be used from any desktop or mobile platform, but they lack the full power of desktop apps.

March 1, 2017

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides is Google's free-for-everyone online office suite, and it excels at helping users create and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. If you're sharing a small number of documents with only a few colleagues, the free version of this suite is enough. But for corporate, educational, or any other organized, collective operation, you'll want the paid (starting at $5 per user per month) subscription-based versions that Google offers under the name G Suite.

G Suite's Competition

G Suite has powerful rivals, including various corporate-level versions of Microsoft Office 365; Apple's set of iCloud-accessible apps, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (which used to be sold as a suite called iWork); and online collaboration services like Zoho. Even when compared with these productivity titans, G Suite has plenty of advantages, and it gets new and improved features every few weeks. It has limits too, however, as I'll explain, so you need to make sure it strikes the right balance for your needs before committing to it.

Getting Started With G Suite

I set up a G Suite account through a simple wizard that required me to choose a domain name, either one I already owned, or a new domain that I could create by paying a $12 annual registration fee. I created a new domain, PCMagReviewers.com, and then created e-mail accounts at that address for myself and some colleagues. The setup screen let me send out messages to my colleagues' existing addresses notifying them of the new addresses I had created for them. After that, I signed in at google.com using my new e-mail address, and a menu at the upper right of the window let me access all the G Suite apps.

G Suite offers three versions: Basic, Business, and Enterprise. All include the Google apps and calendar, video and voice conferencing, and management features. The Basic service costs $5 per user per month and gives you a total of 30 GB of cloud storage, shared among users. The Business version costs $10 per user per month and offers unlimited storage, plus archiving, auditing and data-retention features for corporate compliance, and electronic discovery for use when gathering legal evidence. Enterprise plans are priced individually and add advanced security, data-retention, and data-analysis features. Note that business subscriptions to Office 365 also start at $5 per user per month.

G Suite's management menus are clear and straightforward, but Microsoft's equivalent menus in corporate versions of Office 365 seem to me easier to navigate and visually more elegant. Apple doesn't offer a corporate-level service comparable to G Suite or Office 365, though the $19.95 macOS Server add-on to macOS provides features for sharing files, calendars, contacts, and mail accounts.

G Suite Administration

I've been using an enterprise version of G Suite for years through a large organization that I work for, but, for this review, I tested G Suite's Basic service to get an idea of what it's like to administer the suite instead of merely using the setup that an administrator created for me. As in corporate-level versions of Office 365 and Zoho Docs, I used a site-creating wizard to build a website for my new domain, and make it accessible either only to users with addresses at PCMagReviewers.com or to anyone on the web.

The Google Sites app that creates these sites has all the elegance and simplicity of Google's other apps, making it effortless to build a multipage site in less than an hour. Google Sites is free for anyone to use, but free users can only create sites with a sites.google.com address, while G Suite subscribers use their own domain name as their site address, just as in any other paid web-hosting service.

Office Suite Functionality

G Suite's versions of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides offer the same elegant, minimalist-looking templates that you get in the free versions, but G Suite lets you upload your own documents, spreadsheets, or presentations to use as templates for creating new ones.

For collaboration and sharing, G Suite offers more options than you get with the free Google apps. For example, you can specify that a document can be shared only with members of your organization, or only members of your organization to whom you've sent a sharing link. As with the free Google office suite, you can specify that changes made to your document by your collaborators appear in color, to indicate that they're suggestions rather than actual edits. These suggestions can be accepted or rejected one by one by clicking on buttons in the comment panel at the right of the window.

When you choose G Suite over Office 365 or Apple's apps, you're making a major decision to rely on data and apps that live almost entirely in the cloud, accessible only in a browser or a mobile device. Google doesn't supply desktop apps like the desktop versions of Microsoft Word or Excel or Apple's Pages and Numbers. If you want to edit your documents on a Wi-Fi challenged airplane, you'll need to edit them in Google's Chrome browser via an optional extension. And, before you go offline, you'll need to download every document that you want to edit. I'm not willing to take that kind of trouble every time I risk being somewhere—like a typical Amtrak train—where Wi-Fi may suddenly stop working.

Office Suite in the Cloud

In contrast with Google's cloud-only apps, Microsoft's and Apple's apps run either on the desktop or in a browser or mobile device, and the desktop apps have the kind of power that no mobile app can offer. Also, Microsoft's OneDrive and Apple's iCloud typically store copies of your documents on your hard disk and also in the cloud, whereas Google stores only links to your documents in the Google Drive folder that you can create on your hard disk. You can download your Google documents to your hard disk but only in formats like Office format or Open Document (LibreOffice) format, not in the Google Docs format itself. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that my documents live in the cloud in a format that I can't download on my hard disk, but this may not bother you as much as it does me.

Cloud-only apps like Google's always have a reduced feature set compared to desktop equivalents, but the vast majority of documents and worksheets don't need any more features than Google provides. The apps in G Suite have Google's typically elegant interface, and I'm impressed with the way Google takes keyboard accessibility seriously. The toolbars and menus display keyboard shortcuts for almost every feature, so you don't need to strain your wrist mousing around the screen as you mostly need to do with Apple's apps. (Microsoft's online Office also offers plenty of keyboard shortcuts.)

Editing and Versioning

The Google apps keep track of all editing changes that you make on your document, going back to the time it was first created. You can revert to an older version of your Google Slides presentation or simply use the document-history feature to look back at an old version to find and copy text that you want to paste into the current version. Microsoft and Apple both offer a Track Changes option, but you need to remember to turn it on, and it's much more convenient to have it running by default. Apple's apps let you turn on revision tracking in the desktop version, but the online versions of Apple's apps don't support revision tracking at all, which can be a problem. If you use a browser to open a document that has revision tracking switched on, you won't be able to edit it.

Another advantage in Google's apps is the Explore pane, which you can open from the menu or a keyboard shortcut. Like Microsoft's Smart Lookup feature, Explore searches the web for relevant information about your document. Unlike Microsoft's feature, however, Google displays a quotation-mark icon next to each of its search hits. Click on this icon, and the reference material is inserted into your document as a footnote. You'll probably need to format and revise the footnote text, but you'll avoid a lot of complicated steps required to add references in any other app.

An Excellent Office Suite

G Suite has plenty to offer any organization that needs a collaboration-ready office suite, a website, shared calendars, and mail services. Compared with Office 365, which exists on the desktop and in the cloud, G Suite is cloud-only, and that's either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your needs. Cloud-only apps are an advantage if you want to assure that everything produced by your organization is always available. They're a disadvantage if you want the full power of desktop apps, or if you need offline access to your files.

I'm impressed with the ease, elegance, speed, and depth of G Suite, and if I still prefer to get my work done in Office 365, that's because I need the full power of desktop apps like Microsoft Word for the work I do. If your organization can manage with the relatively lightweight cloud-only apps in G Suite, and you don't mind keeping your documents in Google Drive, G Suite is a superbly powerful and elegant choice and an Editors' Choice winner for business-class cloud-based office suites.